Walled Gardens: Scenes from an Anglo-Irish Childhood

(, New edition)

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This is a journey both into a time and a place - the South of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The author describes a childhood outside the main currents of the twentieth century; her parents still went fox hunting and horse racing and relied on readily available servants from a vast and inexpensive work-pool. At the same time they had no central heating, no television, and the roof leaked. Like many other Anglo-Irish families they attempted outlandish and impractical schemes to maintain deteriorating driveways and crumbling houses. This is an affectionate yet unsentimental memoir of a transitional generation, one born too late to benefit from the last years of the Ascendancy, but too early to integrate into the mainstream of contemporary Irish life.